Welcome to r/socialism!

Welcome to /r/socialism, a subreddit for those who consider themselves socialists and/or wish to engage in constructive, civil discussion about world events and socialist ideas. People from all socialist organizations, groups, and tendencies are welcome, along with those who are just curious about socialism, given they're respectful.

Socialism: democratic control of the means of production by the working class for the good of the community rather than capitalist profit.

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"[Martin Luther] King began to speak of the need for fundamental changes in the political and economic life of the nation, and more frequently expressed his opposition to the war and his desire to see a redistribution of resources to correct racial and economic injustice.[127] He guarded his language in public to avoid being linked to communism by his enemies, but in private he sometimes spoke of his support for democratic socialism. In one speech, he stated that "something is wrong with capitalism" and claimed, "There must be a better distribution of wealth, and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism."[128]" From wikipedia. Very interesting.

A large amount of American "heroes" were socialist or had sympathies approaching thus including; Hellen Keller, Mark Twain, Francis Bellamy, and it's known that Marx wrote letters to Lincoln during his presidency.

I dunno. Mark Twain is something of a mixed bag. On the one hand he wrote of his sympathies with the Sans Culottes (amongst the most radical groups) of the French Revolution, but he also campaigned hard for extensions to copyright lengths, ostensibly to line his pockets.

I am directed to inform you that the address of the Central Council of your Association, which was duly transmitted through this Legation to the President of the United [States], has been received by him.

So far as the sentiments expressed by it are personal, they are accepted by him with a sincere and anxious desire that he may be able to prove himself not unworthy of the confidence which has been recently extended to him by his fellow citizens and by so many of the friends of humanity and progress throughout the world.

The Government of the United States has a clear consciousness that its policy neither is nor could be reactionary, but at the same time it adheres to the course which it adopted at the beginning, of abstaining everywhere from propagandism and unlawful intervention. It strives to do equal and exact justice to all states and to all men and it relies upon the beneficial results of that effort for support at home and for respect and good will throughout the world.

Nations do not exist for themselves alone, but to promote the welfare and happiness of mankind by benevolent intercourse and example. It is in this relation that the United States regard their cause in the present conflict with slavery, maintaining insurgence as the cause of human nature, and they derive new encouragements to persevere from the testimony of the workingmen of Europe that the national attitude is favored with their enlightened approval and earnest sympathies.

It was past tense, used as a call to similarly work together to do things now like they did in the past, or something like that.

For the American people can no more meet the demands of today's world be acting alone than American soldiers could have met the forces of fascism or communism with muskets and militias. No single person can train all the math and science teachers we'll need to equip our children for the future. Or build the roads and networks and research labs that will bring new jobs and businesses to our shores.

I also disdain both parties, but it's inaccurate to claim he was talking about any present form of communism.

He can frame it in the past tense but with the resurgence of socialist movements we might find he's at odds with our ideals in more than just a "should be relegated to the dust bins of history" fashion.

While the FBI and CIA are certainly still trying to undermine domestic (and international) socialism, it seems that the political parties are too self-involved with their own squabbles to pay it much mind, which gives us a better opportunity to act.

There is still a lot of bitterness towards the idea of communism due to the cold war, I mean it wasn't that long ago. This isn't helped by fear mongering idiots like Alex Jones and Fox News. Also a lot of people think communism then instantly think Russian and Chinese death camps and piles and piles of bodies, they see it as an event, a bad one at that, not as a political ideology.

Well, it's a very wrong statement to make. The republicans are throwing a big fit every week about Obama's "Socialism". There's also the ongoing CIA subversion of every leftist or left-of-center state we can imagine.

The US government has systematically locked out anyone besides authoritarian capitalists since its inception. It is very concerned with anyone besides its own ideology and refuses to embrace any idea of democracy where we can introduce and debate new ideas. So even in that alone, the government's system of policy-making resists leftist ideologies.

That's because we believe in making the world a better place. Sometimes, we get away with it. Once a Socialist's inclinations have been thoroughly whitewashed and posthumously brought into the Capitalist fold, they are fit for patriotic lionization.

"I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered."

(He's talking about capitalism)

After civil rights he realized that it wasn't enough to achieve equality and that the economic system was at the root of the problem. He became radicalized.

Capitalism as a system encourages negative competition, racism is a form of negative competition where one race (and that could be any race) uses the power over the system, land, etc. to maintain control over their competition. Prejudice might not ever dissipate, even under a socialist system, but the things which cause these small forms of discrimination won't allow them to become the large, negative competition forces they are without profit motive.

racism is a result of a class system. capitalism is but one of many types of class systems. nobody thinks that racism never existed before capitalism and won't exist after it, just that it uses and perpetuates it.

Racism and classism in America are intertwined. While many people are still racist towards Obama, he's given a large pass for his wealth that most of his supporters probably wouldn't give to poorer black people.

MLK's "militarism" is a particular component of what we might call imperialism, the economic dominance of the centers of capitalism over the rest of the world, sustained by military as well as economic means. America's involvement in the Vietnam War, of which MLK was an outspoken critic, is one of the most prime examples. The existence of weapons isn't something we can address short of some utopia, but the existence of a military industry that makes war for profit, and of imperialist capitalism that uses it as a tool to dominate the global periphery, absolutely is.

We also have to struggle against racism, sexism, heterosexism, cissupremacism, and every other form of oppression, within and without the left, in the process of fighting capitalism. We for certain cannot carry out class struggle and claim that once those contradictions will simply disappear once we've established socialism, or consider feminism, anti-racism, and queer liberation totally discrete movements that shouldn't be part of socialism. It's all intersectional, is the key point, but not in a way that reduces everything to class. And when we get into this mentality of "we're the good guys, we don't do that" then we get what happened to the SWP. Our fight is many fights.

Neither COINTELPRO at large nor the specific surveillance and subversion of Martin Luther King, Jr. was the result of Richard Nixon, as both significantly predated him. If you wanted to blame one person, it would be J. Edgar Hoover, but that would be a shallow explanation; it is the U.S. government at large that was to blame, and is still to blame for very similar programs today.

Nixon had a lot to do with increasing the demand for domestic intelligence along with suppressing the black vote.

Let's remember that he was Eisenhower's VP when they deposed Iran's PM in 1953 and let's remember that the FBI had a Latin American network that had to be dismantled since Hoover couldn't be the intelligence czar. Nixon had a hand in giving power to Hunt, Helms, and Hoover in gathering intelligence. The fact that Nixon wanted to win in 1960 lead to the death of JFK, MLK, and RFK respectively.

It was a close merger of Nixon taking bribes from the mafia to overthrow Fidel Castro from 1959-1963, leading to Watergate.

"One day we must ask the question, "Why are there forty million poor people in America?" And when you begin to ask that question, you're raising a question about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy.

And I'm simply saying that more and more, we've got to begin to ask questions about the whole society. We are called upon to help the discouraged beggars in life's market place. But one day we must come to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.

It means that questions must be raised. You see, my friends, when you deal with this, you begin to ask the question, "Who owns the oil?" You begin to ask the question, "Who owns the iron ore?" You begin to ask the question, "Why is it that people have to pay water bills in a world that's two-thirds water?" These are words that must be said."

glenn beck has been saying that he is a huge fan of MLK for years now. he has also managed to convince people that obama is a maoist and that everyone needs to stock up on food and ammo for the coming apocalypse. he could probably incite an end of the world riot by reading war of the worlds on air.

No, not really. This is the fucking problem. You don't fucking think reforming the system towards democratic socialism is a good thing? Honestly? Lenin makes no convincing arguments. Marx had some interesting ideas, but many of them fail to apply to modern contexts. It's like there's this dogma. It's worse than those on the American right who look upon the Founding Fathers as some sort of prophets, and their writings as holy script. You look on Marx and Lenin as some sort of demigods, and their writings as sacrosanct to you as the Qur'an is to Muslims. It's disgusting.

I have similar criticisms of hardline communists and socialists too. Not all of Marx applies to a modern society and I think the development of Nuclear weapons and drones as well as the internet changes a lot. I think its okay to follow Marx, but what some fail to understand is that everything he says is not the end of the discussion. Revolutionaries would be taken more seriously by the people if they adapted to modern times.

The basic premise of exploitation. Read some Žižek. Is a computer programmer today exploited by Microsoft? It's very hard to see how someone with 100K pay is "exploited". What about the hordes of unemployed? They would love to be exploited, but can't get to that point. Žižek suggests we think today more in terms of rent - that it's becoming the central category of today's capitalism. For instance, that we have to pay Microsoft rent (to use Windows), even though Windows is built on "common intelligence" technology that was developed at Universities in the public domain (for FreeBSD and so on). - So it's more and more about corporation appropriating the commons and us paying the rent for that. - And what about Facebook, Google, etc.? Those corporations profit from us but we're not selling our labour to them. We're giving them our labour for free. Even Reddit profits from us, from our sharing of our intelligence here. - Obviously things have changed, obviously it's all moving. - It's funny that Marxists say things haven't changed from the 19th century. Marxists of all people. Marx was a hard-core historicist. In his view, things were always in motion. Read how he commented the political events of his time. He changed perspectives as events unfolded, he always analysed actual empirical data. If Marxism won't keep evolving, adapting, it will just die.

Look at Lenin to see Marxism's application to the imperialist society. Look at Mao to see Marxism's application to the third world and to agrarian society. Look at Cuba and look back at Che and Fidel's revolutionary days.

In the spirit of MLK day, look at the Black Panther Party to see how Marxism applies to the ongoing struggle for Black liberation.

Social democracy is at the essence a CAPITALIST ideology. Reformed capitalism yes, but capitalism nonetheless. Better than libertarian capitalism? Sure. But it's moot point because it's like comparing Bush and Obama and saying Obama is 'better', but in the end, both are imperialistic hacks bombing children overseas.

Bush was better for one reason: The liberal media and civil rights groups actually attacked him for drones and infringing on human rights in the name of counterinsurgency. yet they are silent when Obama ups the drones, and signs a bill into law saying an american citizen can be held without trial indefinitely if he is on the terrorist watch list.

With his healthcare plan, he is hiding the problems that health insurance companies, and the american health care system in general, cause. That one bill has made it a lot harder to get a single payer system through congress.

look at what happened after the great depression. this was a time when the capitalist economy was at it's weakest, the socialist movement in america was at it's strongest, there was a socialist superpower forming, and the US had a president and a congress that was willing to stick it to the rich. it was the closest we have ever come to fighting for socialist reforms, and likely the closest we will ever be. and guess what happened? every single reform that was hurting the capitalist class got rolled back and now they are bigger, stronger, and wealthier than ever. and why is that? because the capitalists were still left in power. they will give ground on anything as long as they remain in power because they know they can eventually take it all back. you will never reform the capitalists out of existence and that is why it will always fail.

I like how you just brush aside every advancement made under socialist regimes because they don't fit your definition of TrueSocialism™. It just shows intellectual laziness on your part for failing to look at things from a materialist perspective.